What does the fact that 15 of the Sept. 11 hijackers are Saudis tell
us?

It's a rather important fact. It tells you a great deal about the fissures in
Saudi society, plus the fact that bin Laden's a Saudi, also the fact that these
are not poor disadvantaged teenagers from the intifada, from the Gaza camps, or
from the camps in Peshawar. These were people that, for the most part, could
have made it in the modern globalized world. Mohamed Atta graduated from
Hamburg Technical Institute with high honors. His father was a distinguished
doctor.

Osama bin Laden's from a very rich family. His Egyptian number two is from a
very distinguished family. The father and grandfather are very important
prominent people in Egyptian history and society. These are your classic
alienated radical intellectuals who are pursuing wild radical intellectual
dreams, and carrying them to extremes. ... They're very dangerous men. They do
tend to come from Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and that is very indicative of the
fissures in those societies.

But those are our allies.

Yes, but these are countries that are facing the dilemma of modernization,
poverty, fundamentalism. As countries grapple with modernization, people who
are left behind tend to hold firmer and firmer to their view of the evil of
modernity. There's a long intellectual tradition of this in Egypt. They killed
Sadat. They tried to kill Nasser. And they tried to kill Mubarak. So all three
of the Egyptian presidents in the last 50 years have been targets of these
people, and they succeeded in one case. They would kill the Saudi [royal
family]; they would kill Yasser Arafat. They'd kill Musharraf in Pakistan in a
second if they could.

He served as the U.S. representative to the United Nations during the
Clinton administration and was chief architect of the 1995 Dayton peace
agreement for Bosnia. He is currently heading an
independent anti-terrorism task force at the Council on Foreign
Relations. In this interview, he warns that the
U.S. must be careful not to create further instability in Saudi Arabia. This interview was conducted in October 2001.

You said they would kill the Saudi royal family. But it appears more and
more that there seems to be sympathy running for them in Saudi society.

Sympathy for them in Saudi society? I think Saudi society is split. Egyptian
society is split. There is a split between Muslims who want to practice their
faith in peace and tolerance with other religions and other people, and these
extreme, radical fundamentalists who have shown a total lack of tolerance for
people with different views, starting with people who they don't think are good
Muslims, and going on to include Christians and Jews.

The dominant form of Islam in Saudi Arabia is a fundamentalist group who
have internationalized their views using Saudi money, because there's a lot of
money around. And that's become a sort of swamp, if you will, for breeding
these people.

I think that one of the tragedies of this story is that the Saudi Arabians
exported their problem by financing the schools, the madrassas, all through the
Islamic world. I saw this in Uzbekistan a few years after Uzbekistan got out of
the Soviet Union, became an independent state in cities like Tashkent and
Samarkand, where the Saudis were funding these schools teaching Koranic studies
and creating a class of people for whom education was simply the Holy Book, the
Koran.

... What happened here was that the Saudi Arabian government had two wings. The
mainland Saudi leadership went into financial issues, defense issues, and they
controlled the elite establishment in order to purchase support. From the more
fundamentalist religious groups, they gave certain other ministries, the
religious ministries, education ministries, to more fundamentalist Islam
leaders. And that's how the split occurred.

So the Saudi government was, to a certain extent, pursuing internally
inconsistent policies throughout this period -- reaching out to the West with
sophisticated, well educated, internationally minded leaders like its foreign
minister, like its ambassador in Washington and others. At the same time, it
was funding with this vast oil revenue a different set of efforts: education,
which was narrowly based in the Koran. ...

Are the Saudis really in trouble?

I think Saudi Arabia has a problem. And because of the unique closeness of
relations between us and Saudi Arabia, we've got a problem with them, which we
have to solve. The terrorists [of] Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are a direct
threat -- not only to the United States -- but even more so to the House of
Saud. And they have tried to deal with it by exporting it. They didn't want
Osama bin Laden back when the Sudanese offered him up about three years ago.
The bin Laden family is a powerful family in Saudi Arabia, as is well known.
And the Saudis have been sitting on a lot of internal contradictions for a long
time.

But for the time being -- and I need to stress this -- I think that any effort
by the United States to undermine the Saudi royal family would backfire. It
would create more anarchy, more chaos, and we need to be very careful about
what we do in a situation which would not be benefited by additional
instability in the region. As for the long-term situation in Saudi Arabia,
that's a significant problem to which I don't have an easy solution.

One solution people are talking about is that we have less dependence on
oil. Then we wouldn't have to worry about them.

If you believe, as I do, that our problems should be less dependence on oil,
foreign oil, then the one president in our lifetime who really attacked this
problem head on was Jimmy Carter with his Project Independence. And that
project, which was designed to reduce our dependence on foreign oil over a
10-year or 20-year period, was abandoned the minute his successors took power
in 1981. I think that was a great tragedy. ...